(2023-10-19) Schroeder Doomscroller Vs Windtunneler

Karl Schroeder: Doomscroller vs. Windtunneler? About twenty years ago, the Canadian army hired me to write them a short science fiction novel, and I made a discovery I think you might find useful.

We’re constantly bombarded with negative messaging, and much of it (particularly in the climate and economics spaces) takes the form of “X will never happen because the existing system can’t do it.” (status quo, theory of change)

I’ll show you three ways to detect and diagnose such arguments and show how I’ve learned to counter them in a defensible way.

first, let’s take the eVTOL argument as an example

These are highly convincing arguments. There are more

I use storytelling techniques to do this; many futurists use a more restricted approach that they call ‘windtunneling.’

Usually, you develop a set of scenarios. (Scenario planning)

If you want a good summary of the approach at the government level, check out New Zealand’s primer.

This means you’re not parking your eVTOL in your driveway, but instead walking a block or two to get to it.

Are you likely to be able to afford one? No; but they make perfect sense as part of a Mobility as a Service (MaaS) system.

What about the shortage of pilots

The solution is simple: don’t use pilots. Drones are already perfectly capable of flying intricate flight paths without danger of collision.

I’m not suggesting you follow such a formal methodology, just saying that there is one

several simple solutions, such as meticulously swept neighbourhood parking lots specifically for eVTOLs.

using existing rail corridors etc. The prospect is that truck transport starts to wither, reducing the need for roads and driveways that connect to every building

Putting the above synergies into motion in a story, I would find myself getting dragged toward the idea of using eVTOLs for freight.

Even if eVTOLs are more expensive by themselves, how much money could we collectively save by reducing the scale of the car-and-road-based industrial culture we have now? And without sacrificing mobility or freedom? That math smells wrong

Presentism. This is the fallacy of assuming that current circumstances, perspectives, or norms are universally applicable or will continue indefinitely.

There are three main problems with the way this YouTuber presents them:

False equivalence. They directly map the characteristics of helicopters onto eVTOLs

Refusal to synthesize. This is the subtle one, and where the Canadian army comes back into the picture. In 2005 they hired me to write Crisis in Zefra, a design fiction

I followed it up in 2014 with Crisis in Urlia.

I was handed a massive file of innovations and technologies that the client wanted included.

something magical happens when you take a laundry list like that, and synthesize all its parts into a narrative

I discovered that the only way this future world made sense was when I took into account how each innovation or technology affected all the others

The subtle fallacy of the “it’ll never happen” argument lies in its refusal to imagine how the different innovations that go into something truly new, such as eVTOLs, might reinforce each others’ advantages and create new use cases.